Rightscale
Righscale has emerged as a leader when it comes to helping companies manage multicloud environments. It helps businesses run apps on whatever infrastructure they might have, whether they are public, private, or hybrid clouds. Rightscale supports eight public clouds, including Amazon AWS, Rackspace, Windows Azure, Google Compute Engine, HP, SoftLayer, IDCF, and Datapipe as well as private cloud providers OpenStack and CloudStack. Its customers include the Associated Press, CBS Interactive, Intercontinental Hotels Group, PBS, and Zynga.
Zynga is a good example of a Rightscale customer. The mobile and social game company built one of the earliest versions of a hybrid cloud, mixing Amazon with its own private cloud to create something it called Zcloud. Zynga managed it using Rightscale. The company said it was able to get rid of two out of every three servers.
Rightscale has raised more than $58 million in funding. Chief executive Michael Crandell says its revenue and valuation has continued to increase recently. The company is well placed to ride the push toward a hybrid cloud now that Dell acquired one of its main competitors, EnStratus. Dell has struggled to find focus now thanks to its struggling core PC business, and the protracted battle over who actually owns the company is likely to slow investment in EnStratus.
Rightscale also competes against players like VMware, which has a suite of tools to manage infrastructure. However, VMware is far more focused on managing virtual machines (VMs) inside the enterprise data center, and less interested in doing this inside an Amazon cloud, which has become more commoditized as Amazon itself has added more features for this. VMware will also release its hybrid cloud offering out of beta in the next month or two, which will provide Rightscale with more competition. However, VMware intends mainly to strengthen the link between on-premise and off-premise instances of VMware, which touches only a portion of Rightscale’s business.
Larger players like BMC, HP Oppsware, IBM Tivoli, and CA all offer ways to manage cloud infrastructure. However, Rightscale is emerging as an agnostic and independent leader. It recently became an exclusive reseller of Google’s Compute Engine, for example.
Rightscale’s differentiation is its focus on cloud resources, specifically those exposed through APIs. It continues to build out offerings, including ways to optimize cloud investments through its PlanforCloud service and related consulting services.
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